According to Gentoo/x86 Installation Tips & Tricks the kernel and modules on the Installation CD can be used for a hard disk installation. I have tried this and it has failed, reporting that it cannot mount whatever root partition I specify. The grub entry initially read:

The machine is a Lenovo laptop that's been running Lx and Gentoo successfully for years. Note that "the available partitions" list is empty - seems that the kernel can't detect the four Lx boot partitions on the HDD.

Can anyone please throw some light on this?

Last edited by 52midnight on Sat Mar 16, 2013 5:14 am; edited 1 time in total

The liveCD kernel is made with genkernel. It must have an initrd.
You need to copy the initrd over to boot and tell grub to load it.

All of the hardware device drivers are in the initrd, along with the filesystem drivers you need to load before the genkernel kernel can mount your root.
Your diagnosis is spot on._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

If you don't want to compile a kernel yourself you can use the kernel from the Installation CD and copy it to your system. When you come to the point that you're asked to compile a kernel, go to another terminal (press Alt-F2) and log in with the root password you've supplied at the beginning of the installation.

Copy over the kernel and modules to your Gentoo system:

Code Listing 2.8: Copying over the Installation CD kernel
(${KN} is the kernel name, usually something like 'gentoo' or 'smp')

OK, problem being I can't find one when the CD is mounted. There are two top-level directories, /gentoo.efimg.mountPoint/ and /isolinux/ The first contains gentoo and gentoo.igz and System.map-gentoo all of which I've copied over, also elilo.efi that's a binary of some sort.

The /isolinux/ dir has duplicates of these along with several other files, including isolinux.bin and isolinux.cfg

I know little about booting with isolinux, but it may be that one of these serves the function of an initrd, since there's nothing with that name on the CD. The most likely candidate is probably gentoo.efimg in the root directory.

I've tried listing /boot/ and /mnt/livecd/boot/ when the CD is running, but they're both empty. The CD is install-x86-minimal-20121213.iso

I tried adding initrd /boot/gentoo.efimg to grub.conf with the same failed result.

> 0 2 is the partition map on the ISO, not your hard disk.

Hmm. The install partn is /dev/sda3, or hd(0,2) in grubbish, as specified in grub.conf.